Shad tournament wanes though the run continues

Doug Varju of Easton heads out to try his luck in the Forks of the Delaware… (DONNA FISHER, THE MORNING…)

May 02, 2012|By JD Malone, Of The Morning Call

Three boxes of lures, a collection of long, lean, glistening spoons and short, fat, fluffy darts lingered on the deck of Doug Varju's boat.

He loaded his downriggers and flat lines, checked the depth of the fish wriggling up the Delaware River on his fish finder — three to four feet down in eight or nine feet of water — plunked into his captain's chair and sunk his teeth into a tuna hoagie.

"Now we just need the fish to cooperate," said Varju, sporting black sunglasses, a neon-green shirt and a 30th anniversary Forks of the Delaware Shad Fishing Tournament cap. "And, by the way my left elbow feels, we're in the right spot."

He started with pearl and chartreuse spoons, then swapped them for orange with black dots, while Pic Schoenek, the director of the tournament and Varju's long-time fishing partner, traded the spoons on her line for compact red and white darts. The American shad bulling their way up the Delaware to the spawning grounds where they were hatched aren't feeding, so bait on the lures is a waste.

"We're agitating," Varju said, explaining that the idea behind a spoon or a dart is to provoke the shad to violence.

On Tuesday it was the fish, and some foul algae, agitating Varju and Schoenek. She reeled in her line, swapped lures and marveled at the swarms of phantom fish populating the fish finder.

It was Day 4 of the shad tournament, and the fish were been bigger and more abundant than at any time in the last five or six years. Schoenek said more fish were weighed in the first weekend — more than 100 — than in entire weeks in recent years. So far, the biggest fish, 6.93 pounds, is heftier than any winner since 2006.

Shad larger than 6 pounds have been common this year, and in stark contrast to the 5.92-pound winner in 2011.

Schoenek said it's been a good run this year, even if the shad never return to the 8- and 9-pound glory of the 1980s when the tournament first started and once drew more than 1,000 anglers to the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh rivers.

This year, fewer than 300 anglers registered for the tournament, Schoenek said, and the handful of boats bobbing in the river echoed the declining popularity of the contest. She said almost all of the entrants are middle-aged men and an entire demographic, men and women aged 16 to 30, are more or less missing.

Varju sees the slow erosion of entrants as a signal of the times, both economic and cultural. He said kids grow up with myriad distractions — video games, a slew of sports, the Internet — compared to a generation ago.

According to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, the tournament's tumble mirrors a drop is fishing licenses. License sales peaked at 1.2 million in 1990 and dipped to 800,000 in 2011. The commission said regular, die-hard license sales — anglers who have bought a license for five consecutive years or more — make up 10 percent of sales. The commission said in its 2011 annual report that the retention of young anglers is a top priority, and it starts with adults teaching children to fish.

Varju and Schoenek said they grew up as river rats, playing in and around the waterway from a young age, something almost unheard of today. Varju, who was taking time off work Tuesday to fish, said people just have less free time and a waning connection to the outdoors.

As Varju checked his downriggers again and mucked off small tendrils of rock snot – a woolly algae also known as didymo that was first seen in Delaware last month – he peeled a small mouth bass off a spoon. It was the only fish the pair caught.

Neither minded much as they surveyed the meager catches on the boats nearby — several anglers hooked shad, but all were smaller bucks. Schoenek often called out as the shad first popped out of the water on someone's line.

"It's a baby," she'd belt out. "Let it go!"

Varju rubbed his hands and talked about the electric feeling of reeling in a shad, which are known to punch way above their weight when it comes to fighting anglers. He changed the lures on his downriggers once more and cast another flat line into the current. Varju smiled and reminisced about destroying his boat's outboard motor a few years ago in the rapids just south of Easton — he and Schoenek don't drift past the railroad bridges these days.

"I don't like anything about shad fishing," Varju said, surveying his placid lines. "I like just being outside. Fishing is just a bonus."